Summer in a jar

Remembering her rural family garden, this city dweller vows to make time to master the fine art of canning fresh vegetables.

I've made up my mind-this summer I'll grow some decent tomatoes and learn to make Mother's chili sauce. Yes, I'm a schedule-juggling suburbanite, but I'll just have to let the laundry go and vacuum another day. I'm 40 years old; it's high time I started canning.

When I was growing up, our vegetable garden-more than a quarter acre-was what you might call an extended family affair. We always planted it at the foot of a towering pear tree that my grandfather had tended years before. The annual ritual commenced in spring, when my Uncle Bud would use a farm tractor to break ground. Then, three branches of our family tree-aunts, uncles, and cousins-would plant together. (I always tried to get tomato-planting duty because watering them gave me a license to make mud.)

Beginning in early summer, a harvest of fresh produce would arrive in waves: first the turnip greens, then the squash, then 'Silver Queen' corn. Next came tomatoes, peas, and peppers, followed by green beans, and finally-the late arrivals-butterbeans and okra.

Even as kids, my cousin Kathy and I knew that there was a right way to can and freeze vegetables. At the onset of canning season, pressure cookers came out of storage, and boxes of freezer bags would appear. Our mothers and aunts would gather their empty mason jars and meticulously sterilize them.

The vegetables themselves received equally careful handling. Stems had to be removed from the turnip greens just so. Nary a string could remain on the green beans. As for the 'Silver Queen,' my mother would not allow even a snippet of silk on her corn. After shucking each ear and brushing it with a stiff brush, we would extricate-one by one, if necessary-even the most stubborn strands buried between those white rows of kernels.

While Kathy and I sometimes grew impatient with all the shelling, shucking, and picking silk, we were always, to some degree, fascinated by the whole process. On summer afternoons, if we were bored with our bicycles and Barbies, we'd play canning.

We'd scare up a few old jars from the back porch and rinse them off with the hose. Then we'd pick bunches of clover (our turnip greens), pack them in the jars, fill the jars with water, carefully secure flat lids with metal rings, and display our handiwork on a shelf on the porch. After admiring it for two seconds, we'd dump out the clover and start all over again.

I think what we sensed, but didn't fully understand, is that gathering the treasures of summer is not so much a process as an art. And the women of our family were masters. As children, we made a game of studying their technique. As adults, we try to make time to listen and learn in hopes that we, too, might capture summer's bounty in all its colors, displayed behind the glass of mason jars.

Copyright Southern Progress Corporation Jun 2003
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